Summer campaign of 1849
235. Summer campaign of 1849
Both sides had been preparing to the summer campaign and neither had all its forces concentrated on one front.
The main Austrian army of Haynau was lining along the border on both side of the Danube with its Northern part behind the March River and Southern behind the Leitha River. The Croatians of Jellacic had been concentrated in the Eastern part of Slavonia between the Danube and Serbian border besieging Petervarad and on the far Eastern end in the Southern Transylvania there were troops of Clam-Gallas.
The main army of Görgei was placed North of the Danube stretching to Lipotvar and, on Kossuth’s insistence, Bem with his troops had been left in the Southern Transylvania. Görgei was not in a very good situation on more than one account:
As a result, on the main direction Görgei with 51,000 Hungarian soldiers (including also the garrison of the fortress of Komárom) and 196 field guns had been facing Haynau with 71,000 and 336 cannons.
Situation with the Russian direct intervention still had been unclear: after FJI rejected demand for the peace conference there was a defening diplomatic silence and while small part of the assembled Russian troops remained in Bukovina the rest marched away in the unknown direction. Discussions between the arrived diplomats and Hungarian government kept going on but on seemingly critical issue of Hungary's future Kossuth was stubbornly avoiding any specifics and, not too surprisingly, his revolutionary rhetoric was not welcomed by the representatives of a rather conservative monarchy. Bertalan Szemere and Count Batthyány kept pressing him and now Görgei also joined the chorus, trying to implant into the Regent-President’s head a seemingly obvious idea that on its own Hungary is going to lose. Unfortunately, success of the spring campaign got into Kossuth’s head and he kept dreaming about march on Vienna. The time was seemingly running out when Szemete, Batthyány and Görgei finally declared that either the Russian conditions are accepted or they will immediately resign. Taking into an account Görgei’s prestige in the army, Kossuth finally gave up. The agreement defining future of the independent Hungary was signed and speedily approved by the parliament on June 10, 1849.
Görgei was planning an active defense and the first encounter at Csorna fought on the right bank of the Danube was successful tactically but the general plan of forcing Haynau to move his troops from North to South providing the main Hungarian army with a freedom of operations and possibility of advance to Poszony thus creating threat to Vienna did not work out: Haynau started moving his troops from North to South but because he himself was planning to attack. Another part of the Hungarian plan, to form an army out of two army corps (VII corps and VIII corps, which was a garrison of Komarom) did not quite work out because commander of that army group refused to obey the orders of chief of the general staff József Bayer and kept acting on his own initiative.
In the next battle, fought at Zsigárd on 16 June 1849, while he was in the capital to participate in the meeting of the ministry council, his troops were defeated but the following battle, at Pered, fought at 20–21 June (25,000 Hungarians with 113 cannons vs. 27,000 Austrians with 119) was Hungarian tactical success [2] but it did not seriously impact Haynau’s plan to move South of the Danube and advance from there.
i
However, even the best plans do not always work. This applied not only to Görgei and Haynau but to Paskevich as well. He found his initial area of concentration very disadvantageous. Not only was it requiring crossing through not too convenient par of the Carpathian Mountains at Borgo pass but it would require a long march across the whole Hungary without ability to establish a reliable supply base close to the theater of operations and a need to do numerous river crossings.
So he left a division there with the order to cross and join Bem when and if certain communication arrives and with a bulk of his army marched into Eastern Galicia with a goal to reach Dukla pass. To provide an easy supply line from Russia, one more division with the heavy artillery had been sent to Lemberg. Commandant of the citadel got an offer to capitulate and, expectedly refused. The heavy artillery was installed and within a day one of citadel’s flanking towers had been made indefensible. The message was clear and garrison capitulated.
The direct logistical line both with Russian Empire on the East and Poland on the North was secured even if the Polish troops still had been besieging Przemysl. The siege artillery, not needed anymore at Lemberg, was moved to help the besiegers while Paskevich kept marching by a road parallel to the Hungarian-Galician administrative border, crossing the San River near Sanok and then getting by the Dukla Pass to Hungary
From here it was an easy march to the South through the friendly area. By the time he crossed Dukla Pass Passkevich had with him 25 days worth of the supplies and along the road at least some extras had been provided by the local magistrates or simply bought.
On 26 June Görgei was again in the capital at a ministry council, and tried to convince Kossuth to concentrate all the Hungarian troops, except those from Transylvania and southern Hungary, around Komárom, the strongest fortress in Hungary. This would allow to stop Haynau and perhaps even defeat him.
The ministry council accepted Görgei's plan, but unfortunately because of his required presence at the council, Görgei was unable to concentrate his troops against Haynau's army, freshly deployed from the northern to the southern banks of the Danube, when they attacked Győr on 28 June. Görgei arrived only at the end of the battle, when it was too late to rescue the situation for the overwhelmed Hungarian forces (17,000 Hungarians against 58,000 Austro soldiers); but he managed nevertheless to successfully cover their retreat towards Komárom, by personally leading hussar charges against the advancing enemy forces. While ha was doing so, another ministry council, held this time without Görgei, following Kossuth’s lead abandoned Görgei's plan of concentration and ordered him to abandon the fortress and move with the bulk of his troops toward the capital to get closer to the advancing Paskevich. Abandoning the strongest fortress without a fight looked as a complete lunacy but Görgei agreed to follow the government's plan, in order to avoid an open conflict with them. So, he promised to lead his troops to southern Hungary, starting 3 July, hoping that until that day all the scattered units of his army would be able to gather and join his army. But before he had the chance to accomplish this task, Görgei's troops were attacked on 2 July at Komárom by Haynau's force, which was almost twice the size of his. Görgei defeated them, upsetting Haynau's plan to quickly conquer the capitals. Unfortunately, during the battle he was heavily wounded, had a surgery and, for few days after remained unconscious. As a result, the victory was not fully exploited and Haynau retreated without being pursued.
Before the battle, because of a misunderstanding, Kossuth removed Görgei from the command and demanded that he go to Pest, naming Lázár Mészáros, the former minister of war, who was a weak general, in his place. When Mészáros went towards Komárom to inform Görgei of the change, he heard along the way the sound of the cannonade of the battle of Komárom, and returned to Pest. [3] The cause of Kossuth's drastic act was as follows. Görgei on 30 June, wrote two letters to Kossuth. In the first he reaffirmed his decision to remain with the main Hungarian forces in Komárom and fight a decisive battle against Haynau and in the second, written after he received an order to retreat, he agreed to follow the governments new order. Görgei's two letters were sent on the same day, Kossuth did not notice their registration number, but he read the letters in the wrong order. The letter containing Görgei's removal arrived on 3 July, while Görgei was unconscious from his wound. His officers, led by György Klapka, were against the decision to remove their chief. Kossuth came to understood that Görgei had not disobeyed him, but he lacked the courage to admit his mistake and rescind Görgei's dismissal. Görgei remained the commander of the northern Danube army until he had the opportunity to hand it over,
But this time it was Kossuth’s plan that did not work out. On July 10 vanguard of Paskevich’s army reached Vac. Haynau, after recovering from defeat at Komarom, resumed his march on Buda but after learning about arrival of the Russian troops stopped to reevaluate the situation: with Komarom still in the Hungarian hands he could be easily cut off from Austria with the numeric odds being, this time heavily against him. He did not know exact number of the arriving Russian troops but the odds were going to be at least 2:1 against him. Hynau was an aggressive general but not an idiot and he ordered retreat back to Gyor.
On Adriatic.
What was passing for the Austrian fleet had been hiding in Trieste. After uprising of 1848 in Venice, which most of the crews joined (being Venetians), the new “purely Austrian” fleet lacked pretty much everything: the big ships, the steamships (except for few small paddlers) and especially experience. So it is not a big surprise that when the French-Russian-Ottoman squadron arrived, it was not a battle but just annihilation as a result of which a big part of the city also was destroyed.
Fiume was next and did not fare much better.
Galicia
With the arrival of heavy artillery from Lemberg and Warsaw Chlopicki finally was able to force surrender of Przemysl garrison so, with Lemberg being in the Russian hands and ready to be transferred to Poland, Galicia was finally liberated and it was just a matter of the final peace to make it formal. And the best way to guarantee that such a transfer will happen was, by the obvious geographic reasons, independence of Hungary by which Austria is going to lose the contact with Galicia. So cooperation of King Joseph II with the Russians was a completely wholehearted not only in the area of supplies but also militarily: on his own initiative he sent two of his best cavalry regiments to join Paskevich.
King Joseph II did not mind the nickname “liberator” and, of course, there were lavish celebrations. Opinion of the liberated peasants of Galicia was not solicited but the “educated classes” were happy. An issue of the release payments established by the Austrian administration as a part of the emancipation reform hanged in the air, for a while.
Hungary.
With the danger to the Hungarian capitals being averted, the main Austrian and Russian-Hungarian armies were now marching westward by the opposite banks of the Danube leaving “Observation Corps” to protect the capitals.
A joined corps of total 50,000 had been sent south to join Perczel and crush Jelačić. The most important task was to lift siege of Petervarad thus guaranteeing a secure navigation and supply by the Danube.
Kossuth had the first unpleasant surprise: Paskevich demanded that Görgei must remain Hungarian commander in chief and, while both he and Görgei agreed that combining two positions was impractical and Görgei resigned as a minister, it was declared that from now on all military operations are going to be planned by the allied commanders and their staffs and that ministry of war, and government in general, must limit their war-related activities to the issues of supply and mobilization: Field-marshal made it abundantly clear that he is not going to accept any orders from the civilians and pointed out to the signed agreement.
And, speaking of the agreement, another “item” of that agreement, chief of the Life-Guards Imperial Militia Battalion, 21 years old, handsome and recently married, had been present in Paskevich’s staff [4]. To the consternation of the Regent-President, he easily found a common language with the Hungarian commander in chief and his subordinates. The rest of the Hungarian government did not see it as a problem. For them.
_____________
[1] It seems that in OTL the REAL “triggering factor” for NI was an active participation of Bem and other Polish emigrants: he saw this as a potential danger to the Russian Empire in the case the Hungarian Revolution succeeds. To a certain degree this is confirmed by his orders to Paskevich. “…after destroying Bem and others of his ilk , immediately turn around and march back home..” “There is no reason for entering Transylvania. This is Austrian business … When everything id screwed, it would be foolish to fix their mistakes with the Russian blood… The Austrians, not being able to win by themselves, want to do the job by Rissian hands but I don’t want this.” The “polish traitors of 1831” are listed as one of the main factors for intervention in Nicholas’ manifest of 26 April 1849 which was followed by the memorandum of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that was pointing to the Russian “complete non-intervention” for the whole year, a danger the uprising represents to the domestic order in Russia and finally references to the “moral obligations” and other standard demagoguery. In other words, intervention had been dictated first and foremost by what NI considered Russian domestic interests and the rest was mostly a demagoguery. In other words, even in OTL he was not as big of an ideology-driven idiot as traditionally portrayed. ITTL the framework is completely different and so are the actions.
[2] In OTL Haynau won by having extra 12,000 Russian troops but before their deployment the Hungarians were reasonably successful.
[3] Kossuth, with his never failing ability to make the wrong decisions and to pick up the wrong people, was seemingly one of the greatest Austrian assets. Adding to this his talent as a public speaker combined with seemingly, absolute absence of thereof as a head of a country at war and an itch to interfere into the military matters, he looks like an earlier version of A.F.Kerensky. 😉
[4] In OTL he did participate in Hungarian Campaign.
“The government restricted by the issues of legality can’t save the country. I’m convinced that either situation changes or the nation will be forced to introduce such an executive power which will act based not upon the laws but upon the fact that the country is in danger.”
Lajos Kossuth, 4 September 1848, Speech in National Assembly
“From now on our newspapers should not publish any details about the uprisings, revolts and revolutionary activities, they have to be mentioned in the vaguest manner.”
Nicholas I, 26 March 1848
“I would not interfere if not my own interests, in other words, if I did not see in Bem and other crooks in Hungary the enemies of not only Austria but those who must be eradicated for our own security.”
Nicholas I, 13 April 1849, letter to Paskevich [1]
“Görgei knows the war and he can be defeated only by the maneuvers, not battles.”
Paskevich to Nicholas I
Lajos Kossuth, 4 September 1848, Speech in National Assembly
“From now on our newspapers should not publish any details about the uprisings, revolts and revolutionary activities, they have to be mentioned in the vaguest manner.”
Nicholas I, 26 March 1848
“I would not interfere if not my own interests, in other words, if I did not see in Bem and other crooks in Hungary the enemies of not only Austria but those who must be eradicated for our own security.”
Nicholas I, 13 April 1849, letter to Paskevich [1]
“Görgei knows the war and he can be defeated only by the maneuvers, not battles.”
Paskevich to Nicholas I
Both sides had been preparing to the summer campaign and neither had all its forces concentrated on one front.
The main Austrian army of Haynau was lining along the border on both side of the Danube with its Northern part behind the March River and Southern behind the Leitha River. The Croatians of Jellacic had been concentrated in the Eastern part of Slavonia between the Danube and Serbian border besieging Petervarad and on the far Eastern end in the Southern Transylvania there were troops of Clam-Gallas.
The main army of Görgei was placed North of the Danube stretching to Lipotvar and, on Kossuth’s insistence, Bem with his troops had been left in the Southern Transylvania. Görgei was not in a very good situation on more than one account:
- The reinforcements that Kossuth had promised did not came, because on 7 June General Perczel, the commander of the southern Hungarian army (Jelačić with 53,000 soldiers with 401 cannons against 34,000 Hungarians and 249 cannons), had suffered a heavy defeat in the Battle of Káty, from an Austro-Croatian army, reinforced with Serbian rebels, led by Josip Jelačić and as a result could not send the reinforcements because he needed them there.
- A second problem was that many of his experienced generals, who had proved their talent in the spring campaign, were no longer available: (János Damjanich had broken his leg, Lajos Aulich was ill, and András Gáspár had resigned from the Hungarian army for political reasons being against Declaration of Independence) Görgei was forced to put in their place other officers, who were capable soldiers, but were not experienced as army corps leaders, many of them lacking the capacity to act independently when needed.
- A third problem was that Kossuth in his infinite wisdom appointed Görgei, in addition to his post of a supreme commander, the Minister of War and he could not adequately fulfill the duties of being both supreme commander and head of the war ministry at the same time, being forced to move frequently between Pest and his general staff office near Tata.
- The forth problem was that Bem, who was asked to come from Transylvania with 12,000 troops refused to do so because he was facing the greater force of Clam-Galas (53,000 soldiers and 133 cannons against 39,000 Hungarians, who were mainly fresh recruits, and 107 cannons).
- The problem with the military supplies still had been there even if slightly lessened: with Jelačić controlling the Danube near Petervarad, the caravans could safely go only up the Tisza river, which meant a need to reload the shipments and then transport them by land. So far government did nothing and the same applies to the promise to mobilize the new troops.
As a result, on the main direction Görgei with 51,000 Hungarian soldiers (including also the garrison of the fortress of Komárom) and 196 field guns had been facing Haynau with 71,000 and 336 cannons.
Situation with the Russian direct intervention still had been unclear: after FJI rejected demand for the peace conference there was a defening diplomatic silence and while small part of the assembled Russian troops remained in Bukovina the rest marched away in the unknown direction. Discussions between the arrived diplomats and Hungarian government kept going on but on seemingly critical issue of Hungary's future Kossuth was stubbornly avoiding any specifics and, not too surprisingly, his revolutionary rhetoric was not welcomed by the representatives of a rather conservative monarchy. Bertalan Szemere and Count Batthyány kept pressing him and now Görgei also joined the chorus, trying to implant into the Regent-President’s head a seemingly obvious idea that on its own Hungary is going to lose. Unfortunately, success of the spring campaign got into Kossuth’s head and he kept dreaming about march on Vienna. The time was seemingly running out when Szemete, Batthyány and Görgei finally declared that either the Russian conditions are accepted or they will immediately resign. Taking into an account Görgei’s prestige in the army, Kossuth finally gave up. The agreement defining future of the independent Hungary was signed and speedily approved by the parliament on June 10, 1849.
Görgei was planning an active defense and the first encounter at Csorna fought on the right bank of the Danube was successful tactically but the general plan of forcing Haynau to move his troops from North to South providing the main Hungarian army with a freedom of operations and possibility of advance to Poszony thus creating threat to Vienna did not work out: Haynau started moving his troops from North to South but because he himself was planning to attack. Another part of the Hungarian plan, to form an army out of two army corps (VII corps and VIII corps, which was a garrison of Komarom) did not quite work out because commander of that army group refused to obey the orders of chief of the general staff József Bayer and kept acting on his own initiative.
In the next battle, fought at Zsigárd on 16 June 1849, while he was in the capital to participate in the meeting of the ministry council, his troops were defeated but the following battle, at Pered, fought at 20–21 June (25,000 Hungarians with 113 cannons vs. 27,000 Austrians with 119) was Hungarian tactical success [2] but it did not seriously impact Haynau’s plan to move South of the Danube and advance from there.
However, even the best plans do not always work. This applied not only to Görgei and Haynau but to Paskevich as well. He found his initial area of concentration very disadvantageous. Not only was it requiring crossing through not too convenient par of the Carpathian Mountains at Borgo pass but it would require a long march across the whole Hungary without ability to establish a reliable supply base close to the theater of operations and a need to do numerous river crossings.
So he left a division there with the order to cross and join Bem when and if certain communication arrives and with a bulk of his army marched into Eastern Galicia with a goal to reach Dukla pass. To provide an easy supply line from Russia, one more division with the heavy artillery had been sent to Lemberg. Commandant of the citadel got an offer to capitulate and, expectedly refused. The heavy artillery was installed and within a day one of citadel’s flanking towers had been made indefensible. The message was clear and garrison capitulated.
The direct logistical line both with Russian Empire on the East and Poland on the North was secured even if the Polish troops still had been besieging Przemysl. The siege artillery, not needed anymore at Lemberg, was moved to help the besiegers while Paskevich kept marching by a road parallel to the Hungarian-Galician administrative border, crossing the San River near Sanok and then getting by the Dukla Pass to Hungary
From here it was an easy march to the South through the friendly area. By the time he crossed Dukla Pass Passkevich had with him 25 days worth of the supplies and along the road at least some extras had been provided by the local magistrates or simply bought.
On 26 June Görgei was again in the capital at a ministry council, and tried to convince Kossuth to concentrate all the Hungarian troops, except those from Transylvania and southern Hungary, around Komárom, the strongest fortress in Hungary. This would allow to stop Haynau and perhaps even defeat him.
The ministry council accepted Görgei's plan, but unfortunately because of his required presence at the council, Görgei was unable to concentrate his troops against Haynau's army, freshly deployed from the northern to the southern banks of the Danube, when they attacked Győr on 28 June. Görgei arrived only at the end of the battle, when it was too late to rescue the situation for the overwhelmed Hungarian forces (17,000 Hungarians against 58,000 Austro soldiers); but he managed nevertheless to successfully cover their retreat towards Komárom, by personally leading hussar charges against the advancing enemy forces. While ha was doing so, another ministry council, held this time without Görgei, following Kossuth’s lead abandoned Görgei's plan of concentration and ordered him to abandon the fortress and move with the bulk of his troops toward the capital to get closer to the advancing Paskevich. Abandoning the strongest fortress without a fight looked as a complete lunacy but Görgei agreed to follow the government's plan, in order to avoid an open conflict with them. So, he promised to lead his troops to southern Hungary, starting 3 July, hoping that until that day all the scattered units of his army would be able to gather and join his army. But before he had the chance to accomplish this task, Görgei's troops were attacked on 2 July at Komárom by Haynau's force, which was almost twice the size of his. Görgei defeated them, upsetting Haynau's plan to quickly conquer the capitals. Unfortunately, during the battle he was heavily wounded, had a surgery and, for few days after remained unconscious. As a result, the victory was not fully exploited and Haynau retreated without being pursued.
Before the battle, because of a misunderstanding, Kossuth removed Görgei from the command and demanded that he go to Pest, naming Lázár Mészáros, the former minister of war, who was a weak general, in his place. When Mészáros went towards Komárom to inform Görgei of the change, he heard along the way the sound of the cannonade of the battle of Komárom, and returned to Pest. [3] The cause of Kossuth's drastic act was as follows. Görgei on 30 June, wrote two letters to Kossuth. In the first he reaffirmed his decision to remain with the main Hungarian forces in Komárom and fight a decisive battle against Haynau and in the second, written after he received an order to retreat, he agreed to follow the governments new order. Görgei's two letters were sent on the same day, Kossuth did not notice their registration number, but he read the letters in the wrong order. The letter containing Görgei's removal arrived on 3 July, while Görgei was unconscious from his wound. His officers, led by György Klapka, were against the decision to remove their chief. Kossuth came to understood that Görgei had not disobeyed him, but he lacked the courage to admit his mistake and rescind Görgei's dismissal. Görgei remained the commander of the northern Danube army until he had the opportunity to hand it over,
But this time it was Kossuth’s plan that did not work out. On July 10 vanguard of Paskevich’s army reached Vac. Haynau, after recovering from defeat at Komarom, resumed his march on Buda but after learning about arrival of the Russian troops stopped to reevaluate the situation: with Komarom still in the Hungarian hands he could be easily cut off from Austria with the numeric odds being, this time heavily against him. He did not know exact number of the arriving Russian troops but the odds were going to be at least 2:1 against him. Hynau was an aggressive general but not an idiot and he ordered retreat back to Gyor.
On Adriatic.
What was passing for the Austrian fleet had been hiding in Trieste. After uprising of 1848 in Venice, which most of the crews joined (being Venetians), the new “purely Austrian” fleet lacked pretty much everything: the big ships, the steamships (except for few small paddlers) and especially experience. So it is not a big surprise that when the French-Russian-Ottoman squadron arrived, it was not a battle but just annihilation as a result of which a big part of the city also was destroyed.
Fiume was next and did not fare much better.
Galicia
With the arrival of heavy artillery from Lemberg and Warsaw Chlopicki finally was able to force surrender of Przemysl garrison so, with Lemberg being in the Russian hands and ready to be transferred to Poland, Galicia was finally liberated and it was just a matter of the final peace to make it formal. And the best way to guarantee that such a transfer will happen was, by the obvious geographic reasons, independence of Hungary by which Austria is going to lose the contact with Galicia. So cooperation of King Joseph II with the Russians was a completely wholehearted not only in the area of supplies but also militarily: on his own initiative he sent two of his best cavalry regiments to join Paskevich.
King Joseph II did not mind the nickname “liberator” and, of course, there were lavish celebrations. Opinion of the liberated peasants of Galicia was not solicited but the “educated classes” were happy. An issue of the release payments established by the Austrian administration as a part of the emancipation reform hanged in the air, for a while.
Hungary.
With the danger to the Hungarian capitals being averted, the main Austrian and Russian-Hungarian armies were now marching westward by the opposite banks of the Danube leaving “Observation Corps” to protect the capitals.
A joined corps of total 50,000 had been sent south to join Perczel and crush Jelačić. The most important task was to lift siege of Petervarad thus guaranteeing a secure navigation and supply by the Danube.
Kossuth had the first unpleasant surprise: Paskevich demanded that Görgei must remain Hungarian commander in chief and, while both he and Görgei agreed that combining two positions was impractical and Görgei resigned as a minister, it was declared that from now on all military operations are going to be planned by the allied commanders and their staffs and that ministry of war, and government in general, must limit their war-related activities to the issues of supply and mobilization: Field-marshal made it abundantly clear that he is not going to accept any orders from the civilians and pointed out to the signed agreement.
And, speaking of the agreement, another “item” of that agreement, chief of the Life-Guards Imperial Militia Battalion, 21 years old, handsome and recently married, had been present in Paskevich’s staff [4]. To the consternation of the Regent-President, he easily found a common language with the Hungarian commander in chief and his subordinates. The rest of the Hungarian government did not see it as a problem. For them.
_____________
[1] It seems that in OTL the REAL “triggering factor” for NI was an active participation of Bem and other Polish emigrants: he saw this as a potential danger to the Russian Empire in the case the Hungarian Revolution succeeds. To a certain degree this is confirmed by his orders to Paskevich. “…after destroying Bem and others of his ilk , immediately turn around and march back home..” “There is no reason for entering Transylvania. This is Austrian business … When everything id screwed, it would be foolish to fix their mistakes with the Russian blood… The Austrians, not being able to win by themselves, want to do the job by Rissian hands but I don’t want this.” The “polish traitors of 1831” are listed as one of the main factors for intervention in Nicholas’ manifest of 26 April 1849 which was followed by the memorandum of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs that was pointing to the Russian “complete non-intervention” for the whole year, a danger the uprising represents to the domestic order in Russia and finally references to the “moral obligations” and other standard demagoguery. In other words, intervention had been dictated first and foremost by what NI considered Russian domestic interests and the rest was mostly a demagoguery. In other words, even in OTL he was not as big of an ideology-driven idiot as traditionally portrayed. ITTL the framework is completely different and so are the actions.
[2] In OTL Haynau won by having extra 12,000 Russian troops but before their deployment the Hungarians were reasonably successful.
[3] Kossuth, with his never failing ability to make the wrong decisions and to pick up the wrong people, was seemingly one of the greatest Austrian assets. Adding to this his talent as a public speaker combined with seemingly, absolute absence of thereof as a head of a country at war and an itch to interfere into the military matters, he looks like an earlier version of A.F.Kerensky. 😉
[4] In OTL he did participate in Hungarian Campaign.
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